Archive for January, 2008

If you haven’t heard of TextMate go check it out it’s sweet. It allows a helluva lot of automation and is damn near the only thing you need for development of any language [minus compilers]. I’m about ready to throw away my Flash CS3 IDE I got for free from my day job and shell out the 39 pounds to buy it [those of you who know me personally know I don't ever buy software].

So, here’s a little command I wrote in the form of a bash script [I think all textmate commands are bash scripts or cocoadialog thangs]. The script takes selected input and pads it with “/* */” if it isn’t already, effectively commenting the text or it strips the comment block. I don’t write shell scripts often, so I like it when I get one that’s really useful.

Interfaces in AS3 are super useful for requiring classes to support a set of public methods, enabling other classes to communicate through the interface thereby abstracting the class itself. AS3 doesn’t natively support abstract classes so using Interfaces is a good replacement in some cases, but if you’ve never used an Interface before you probably wouldn’t know how to implement it. The docs help a little, showing you how to instantiate a class using an interface with the “implements” keyword, but doesn’t go much further:

publicclass myClass implements myInterface{}

But what if you’d like to implement a class while extending another? Well, it’s simple once you know the syntax…

publicclass myClass extends baseClass implements myInterface {}

This is a very quick and simple tip that took me a while to find online due to the fact Adobe doesn’t mention it. Such a simple thing should be in the help docs, but I guess adobe thinks that anyone trying to use Interfaces would already know the syntax! Well now you do.